Wim Wenders and Julian Ribeiro Salgado (2014)
The nominations for this year’s Best Documentary Feature Oscar included two films about photographers, who could hardly be more different from one another. Vivian Maier was secretive and single; her ancestry was part of her enigma; her locale was predominantly urban-American. Employed for much of her life as a children’s nanny, she was never a professional photographer and her work was discovered posthumously. Sebastião Salgado, the subject of The Salt of the Earth, is a Brazilian who can fairly be described as a global citizen. His award-winning social documentary photography and photojournalism cover a wide international range. Salgado’s achievements as an environmentalist are remarkable too. In the mid-1990s, he and his wife Lélia began to work on the restoration of the Salgado family’s ranch in Aimorés, in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. The land that they rescued and nurtured is now a nature reserve; the project culminated in the creation of the Instituto Terra, dedicated to reforestation and conservation. Born in 1944, Salgado is very much here to speak for himself (in French). The Salt of the Earth proves that he is also a wonderful camera subject: his strong features and profile, like his photographs, magnetise the viewer.
The examples of his work that Wim Wenders shows in this film, made with Sebastião Salgado’s elder son as co-director and with the evident collaboration of Salgado himself, vary hugely in scale. There are images of large landscapes, often with large numbers of people (or, in Salgado’s more recent work, wildlife) within them. There are individual human images that are intimate, often painful. Many of these still photographs, regardless of their scale, merit the word epic. It’s clear from the critical reception of The Salt of the Earth that, for some people, filling the screen with photographic art and telling the life story of the admirable man who made it and more, amounts to a great documentary. I don’t think it does – largely because Wim Wenders keeps telling us how great his subject is, instead of letting those of us not already familiar with Salgado to discover and decide for ourselves what’s great about him. Wendy Ide in the Times describes it as Wenders’s ‘master stroke … to let the photographs of Sebastião Salgado speak for themselves’. She must have been watching The Salt of the Earth wearing earplugs.
The film’s trailer threatened an intrusive hagiographic commentary but I’d hoped that might be misleading. Some hope: Wenders has too much to say from the very start, when he explains the etymology of the word photograph. ‘A photographer,’ he tells us, ‘is someone literally drawing with light’. That’s fine and sufficient, but not for Wenders: a photographer is also ‘a man [sic] writing and rewriting the world with lights and shadows …’ Perhaps, for Wendy Ide and others, the eloquence of Salgado’s pictures drowned out Wenders’s voice but it didn’t for me. I found some awkwardness too in parts of the (auto)biographical narrative – for example, when Julian Ribeiro Salgado asks his father, ‘What happened in 1979, Dad?’ This is followed by an account of the birth and infancy of Sebastião and Lélia’s second son, Rodrigo, who was diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome. I realise the debilitating effects of Down’s vary but it’s surprising to hear Julian predict an existence of complete isolation for his brother and describe as something akin to miraculous Rodrigo’s development of a form of communication with his family. (Rodrigo is never mentioned subsequently.)
Wim Wenders describes at an early stage the peoples of different countries by whom Salgado was fascinated and whom he has photographed. ‘After all,’ says Wenders, ‘people are the salt of the earth’. Salgado’s own judgment is less sanguine:
‘We humans are a terrible animal; we are extremely violent … Our history is a history of wars; it’s an endless story. We should see these images to see how terrible our species is.’
Watching the BBC news, I sometimes wonder what or where the reporter Orla Guerin is a correspondent for: she seems to be covering whatever is the most dreadful international story of the week. There were moments in The Salt of the Earth, as Wenders worked his way chronologically through Salgado’s CV – famine in Ethiopia, the Kuwait oil fires, the Balkan wars, the Rwandan genocide – when I thought of Guerin; and I see that Susan Sontag once controversially described Salgado as ‘a photographer who specializes in world misery’. It’s clear from what he says in the film that Salgado felt morally compelled to make the choices of photographic subject that he made but it’s clear too that his experiences in Rwanda were as much as he could take: ‘I no longer believed in anything, in any salvation for the human species’. It was at this point in his life that he and his wife turned to the Aimorés reforestation work and he shifted his camera’s attention from the horrors of human behaviour to the natural world of animals and birds, as part of what turned out to be a ten-year project called ‘Genesis’. This has extended to recent study of the Zo’é people, a remote Amazonian tribe who appear to live a life of prelapsarian simplicity (including being ‘naked and … not ashamed’). It seems that, two decades on from Rwanda, Salgado is disinclined to return to human communities more developed and (therefore?) less peaceable than the Zo’é. I don’t get the sense that Wenders means the film’s title, or the sentiment behind it, to be ironic. The trajectory of Salgado’s work and thought means it’s hard not to feel that it should be.
22 July 2015
